Proper Disrespect for False Authority

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The evil of Cognitive Ease

Five day. Actually got up, abluted, and drove to the park where I executed constitutional. Not very satisfying other than the muscle ache. Pushed a bit to get that. But no great thoughts.

Yesterday for semi-annual with general physician. All sort of dire precautions that boiled down to “you are ORF and have to expect parts to fail and eventually kill you from the absence of their functioning.”

Not original nor unthought but unsettling nonetheless.

Which brought me to consider an article [Link] entitled “Here’s why the truth really is subjective, according to science”. It’s an offputting article because it has an inherent contradiction, the use of science and truth together. IMHO, no real (?) scientist talks about truth. Truth, as I have said before, is fundamentally a religion term that has been co-opted by the justicers to placate their insecurities and inadequacies.

The guts of the article – I was unable to make use of the video because I don’t do videos – is not unreasonable. It’s about psychology types making experiments to determine what people (Bogs?) perceive as “truth”. The research is concerned with a mental process (?) called “Cognitive Ease”

“which is a fancy way to describe how hard your brain has to work to perceive information.”

It seems that

“repetition can cause cognitive ease even when there shouldn’t be any. In other words, the more familiar you are with a stimulus, the more cognitive ease you experience and the more likely you are to think things are true – even if they’re definitely not.”

This is a BIG deal. It’s why propaganda and preaching work. If you repeat something to someone enough times, they will believe that something to be “true”.

Evidently no rationality applies here? Of course there is the question of how often Bogs are rational. Some of my colleagues think the answer is “never”, but I have observed Bogs to be rational occasionally.

So the next question is how much religious belief is just cognitive ease brainwashing?